Warp, for example, decided they didn’t want to be a part of a $5/month subscription service (too cheap, they believe)

Ian,

I assume you’re saying they felt the $5 reflected badly on the label - made them look like an inferior product. Do you know if anyone has turned down Y!MU/Musicnet because they felt their compensation for the subscription service wasn’t enough?

Speaking of that, to what extent are we supporting the labels/artists when we listen to music via subscription services? For example, at some point if I listen to an album enough times or authorize the song on my portable for enough months, will the artist/label receive the same amount of profit as they would have if I had walked into a store and purchased the physical CD? (And if so, what is that point?)

Thanks,
hatedigits

Ian,

Do you know if anyone has turned down Y!MU because they felt the compensation for the subscription service wasn’t enough?

Speaking of that, to what extent are we supporting the labels/artists when we listen to music via subscription services? For example, if I listen to an album 200 times on Y!MU is the label/artist getting more or less money from me than if I bought the physical CD in the stores?

Thanks,
hatedigits

One bit of inside information: As mentioned in the post, Yahoo works with a “middleman” (MusicNet) for some, if not all, of its digital content. The royalty rate paid by MusicNet to labels and distributors is only .02 cents per stream, compared to th…

Sorry for ranting about the licensing issue and glad to here you will look into The Fiery Furnaces. I am glad to have found your blog and appreciate your playlists, will need to try them out I have been pleased over all with Yahoo and the YMU subscription. It just seems that more and more the recording industry is getting out of hand with what they consider fair use and it feels like the ones getting the short end of the stick are the ones that play by the rules and do not steal music.

BTW one pain point that the licensing issue brings to the front for me is managing when an artist is no longer available or has changed to 30sec/buy only. This has caused me hours of fighting with my library to find the songs that are no longer licensed and remove them from the playlist that is syncing to my portable (Creative Zen micro) and clean them of the portable as well (to remove the files from the zen, it is sometimes easier to reformat and resync) sometimes this can take an hour or more of my time.

- Mr. Xcitement. Agreed, this is a problem. I’ll look into this specific case with Fiery Furnaces (Rough Trade, correct?). In most cases this is temporary, when the label is changing distributors, for example.

- Meimeimei: Not likely. First of all, notice that iTunes doesn’t fare more than 15% better than us — Mojo reviews a *lot* of music that isn’t available in any subscription service (at least in the states). It’s far more likely that they are serviced with promotional CDs by these labels who would love to be included in Mojo’s Filter.

- In other incoming label news, I’m seeing lots of Drag City bands (from Squirrel Bait to The Fucking Champs, Smog, and Howling Hex) in our catalog. Yay!

ian

One thing you might like to consider, perhaps the music that Mojo recommends is influenced by it being on iTunes?

Obviously Mojo can only recommend stuff they’ve heard, and if Mojo staff themselves use iTunes rather than Yahoo they’re going to recommend stuff that has a better chance of being on there.

*THIS* is a major problem, and it makes the unlimited download service, not much more than a glorified radio station. I mean if I can not depend on being able to access the music I have leased for the duration of my subscription what is the point!? I found ‘The Fiery Furnaces’ through my YMU subscription, I downloaded ‘Blueberry Boat’ and ‘Rehearsing My Choir’ to my Zen and then one day I woke up and I am unable to listen to them. There have been others also. I can understand that this may have not been anything that Yahoo could do anything about, but for me it has left a very sour taste regarding subscription music. It would seem that this whole licensing scheme is so convuluted and will eventualy turn almost all listners off. It sure has made it hard for me (a self proclamed champion of subscription music) to look anyone in the eye and tell them: why buy, when you can have most of the music you listen too as long as you subscribe… oh yea or until *someone* else decides you can’t listen to it anymore.

ian